Aaron Lopez - Business

Business

Lopez established himself as a shopkeeper in Newport shortly after his arrival. By 1755 he was buying and selling goods throughout Rhode Island and dealing with agents in Boston and New York.

One of Lopez's early business interests was the trade in spermaceti, a coveted wax extracted from whale oil that was used to make fine candles. Lopez built a candle-making factory in Newport in 1756. By 1760, a dozen competitors had built similar plants in New England. Whalers couldn't supply the factories with enough spermaceti to meet the demand, and the price of whale oil was climbing. In 1761, Lopez joined eight other merchants to form a trust to control the price and distribution of whale oil.

Lopez expanded his trade beyond the North American coastline and by 1757 had major interests in the West Indian trade. He also sent ships to Europe and the Canary Islands. Between 1761 and 1774, Lopez was involved in the slave trade. While The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews describes Lopez as "Newport's leading participant in the Black Holocaust", historian Eli Faber determined Lopez underwrote 21 slave ships during a period in which Newport sent a total of 347 slave ships to Africa, and Faber described Lopez's ventures in the slave trade as "an infinitesimal part" of the British slave trade. By the beginning of the American Revolution, Lopez owned or controlled 30 vessels.

By the early 1770s, Lopez had become the wealthiest person in Newport; his tax assessment was twice that of any other resident. The reason he was successful was that his business interests were so diverse. He manufactured spermaceti candles, ships, barrels, rum, and chocolate. He had business interests in the production of textiles, clothes, shoes, hats, and bottles. Ezra Stiles, the Congregational minister in Newport and future president of Yale College, described Lopez as "a merchant of the first eminence" and wrote that the "extent of commerce probably surpassed by no merchant in America".

In the mid-1770s, with growing tensions between Britain and its American colonies, Lopez's fortunes began to decline. The Continental Association enforced a boycott against trade with Britain. In October 1775, the British navy anchored outside Newport's harbor and the population began to evacuate the city. In early 1776 Lopez relocated to Portsmouth, Rhode Island; then to Providence, Boston, and finally to Leicester, Massachusetts. Historian Marilyn Kaplan describes Lopez's losses during the American Revolution as "monumental".